As one of the biggest names in the storage industry, Plextor doesn't need much of an introduction. For more than a decade, they've produced some of the best optical drives the industry has seen. Known the world over for their quality, performance, and features, these drives have become favorites among consumers and professionals alike. Today, Plextor continues to lead the way by bringing cutting edge storage technologies to market. Along with a vast assortment of high-performance DVD and Blu-ray drives, the company offers NAS devices, external hard drives and a growing number of solid state drives.

Like many other manufacturers, Plextor has set its sights on the growing solid-state drive (SSD) market. Last fall, the company launched its M5 Pro Series (M5P) SSD. Designed for business and advanced users, this professional-grade SSD combined Marvell's 88SS9187 "Monet" controller with Toshiba's 19nm Toggle Mode NAND to deliver up to 540MB/s read and 450MB/s write transfer rates. It also included features like Plextor's exclusive True Speed technology as well as a unique double-data protection system to protect the integrity and confidentiality of your data.

Plextor has now released its M5Pro Xtreme SSD. While based on the same Marvell 88SS9187 controller chip as the M5 Pro Series, this new drive offers a number of improvements. Along with a newly engineered and redesigned PCB board, the M5 Pro Xtreme comes equipped with the recently released Xtreme firmware update as well as Toshiba’s latest 19nm Toggle Mode MLC NAND flash. The end result is an SSD capable of delivering random read speeds up to 100,000 IOPS along with 540 MB/s sequential read and 470 MB/s sequential write speeds.

For this review, Plextor sent us the PX-256M5Pro Xtreme. This 256GB SSD comes equipped with 512MB of on-board cache and is capable of delivering up to 540MB/s sequential read and 460MB/s sequential write speeds as well as up to 100,000 random read and 86,000 random write IOPS.

Needless to say, this is only a taste of what the PX-256M5Pro Xtreme has to offer. To give you an idea of what to expect, we'll take a closer look at Plextor's new 256GB SSD and then see how well it performs. Does the PX-256M5Pro Xtreme have what it takes? Can it deliver the performance and features that we've come to expect from Plextor? Keep reading as we find out.